Quick. Manic. Breathless.

The stamping, the breathing, the excitement, everything about the arriving shadow betrayed its anger, breaking branches as it passed, crunching gravel beneath its feet.

Worse than anger: hatred.

A beast was charging towards her, a raging beast.

It was a trap. Orsu had disappeared. He had led her to this place in exchange for a few banknotes.

It was only thirty metres away, but Clotilde knew she would never reach the shepherd’s cabin. Suddenly the beast was right in front of her.

Clotilde recognised it.

She hadn’t been wrong, not about the anger or the hatred.

But the creature couldn’t have followed them into the maquis; it had been waiting here for them.

How had it known?

It didn’t matter now. She was lost.

41

My father is cheating on my mother.

He skimmed through the words, the lines, the pages, recto verso, endlessly repeating this simple phrase, then carefully examined the black drawings on the notebook, the spiders, the cobwebs, as if the dry ink might sting him, even after all these years.

Then the writing began to calm down, like anger gently subsiding.

Not his.

*

*     *

Monday, 21 August 1989, fifteenth day of the holidays
Binbag-blue sky

I cheat

You cheat

He or she cheats

I’m on the beach, turning the pages.

Maman is sunbathing and Papa’s asleep.

Papa insisted on taking us to the beach at Port’Agro, an almost secret inlet hidden beyond the rocks of Petra Coda. To get there, you have to follow a donkey-and-goat track through the middle of the maquis, climb a bit, then walk in single file among the needles of the junipers that sting you worse than a regiment of mosquitoes, past a ruined Genoese tower, then another kilometre in the sun without a drop of shade, then twist your ankles on a steep dusty path that leads straight down to the sea, plunge into a sand dune and there, just behind the last of the dunes, you suddenly spy the beach, a paradise that not even ten hikers will have been bold enough to reach during the course of one day.

Almost inaccessible, you are thinking …

One last effort before we get to play at Robinson Crusoe in paradise.

And then it’s true, I swear – there are at least a hundred tourists on the beach. And right in front of us, blocking the horizon, sailing boats, yachts, Zodiacs, dozens of them, anchored beyond the row of buoys that marks the edge of the swimming area. The hulls and white sails of the boats dirty this landscape, like scraps of paper torn up and thrown in the gutter. Robinson Crusoe? You must be joking! Or maybe this is the Corsican version, in the summer. A Robinson Crusoe who’s sent out thousands of messages in a bottle, and guess what, they’ve all been found!

We cheat

You cheat

They cheat